Honoré Sharrer

Honore Sharrer took her first painting lessons from her mother, who had been a pupil of George Luks. She studied at the California School of Fine Art and at Yale, but left because of her feeling that "the school's academic discipline was … incapable of stimulating the artist to seek what was valuable to express." During World War II Sharrer worked as a welder in a San Francisco shipyard, then came to New York, where her paintings were featured in the Museum of Modern Art's Fourteen Americans exhibition in 1946. Over the course of her career Sharrer has made dramatic changes in subject matter and to some degree in technique. In her early "social realist" paintings she depicted American working people, then went through surrealist phase in which she twisted "everyday basic things" to make them funny. In her recent work she explores myth and fairy tale and combines disjunctive imagery to free herself from "the punishment of 'realism.' "

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)